It is a relief to see this view reflected. In an efficient market for business talent, VC should not exist. They could be seen as in effect talent arbitrageurs

It is a relief to see this view reflected. In an efficient market for business talent, VC should not exist. They could be seen as in effect talent arbitrageurs. Something about business culture over a certain size creates a massive inefficiency where someone with the level of skill required to build a successful product is not snapped up by existing firms. Personally, I like anyone who takes an arbitrageurs view because to me betting against bullshit is a costly signal of outlier intelligence. However, viewed this way, it's not about kids in hoodies. College dropouts were useful because the key signal (ivy certificate) that gets them picked up by a firm that would smother their productivity, had been suppressed. That they were selected for the school in the first place was a great negative filter as well, so betting on the remainder is practically a no-brainer. Given the exponential distribution of returns, from a statistical perspective, there isn't much value in explanations for failure because it's by far the most probable outcome anyway. e.g. who cares why startups fail, %90+ of them necessarily must, and merely avoiding a subset of failure scenarios is not equivalent to success. In that environment, there is only one necessary condition for 80th+ percentile talent to maintain: survival. Being the person who climbs up that return curve means surviving the twin perils running out of runway, and of being snapped up by a firm for a job you were originally more suited to anyway. This second peril is the other major attrition factor that prevents people from benefiting from survivor bias. The business of VCs who throw money at geeks in hoodies is to mitigate the former and get exposure to that overlooked subset of the latter. Given the remaining members of that sample, the people who also selected out of being snapped up for jobs will be necessarily over represented - and on that very steep curve. I think this explains why investors like colorful founder stories, because they are (consciously or not) looking for how the founders 1-stddev+ talent signal might have been suppressed. Good news is: the confluence of a) an exponential distribution of success and returns, b) the guaranteed competitor attrition from failures, and c) the further guaranteed competitor attrition from the job market - survivor bias may be less of a bug, and rather, a feature.